The successful Moo Crew Support Team has played a major role in helping FatCow secure a high ranking among the top ten web hosting providers on Consumer-Rankings.com. We talked to Gary Engel, Senior Vice President of Customer Support at FatCow, to find out how they do it.
Q: What’s unique about FatCow’s customer support?
A: “Our HefferCratic Oath sets us apart from other web hosting providers because when it comes to customer support, we put our money where our mouth is. If customers feel we haven’t kept up our side of the bargain – by answering calls in less than two minutes on average, providing answers to your questions at that time or a firm follow-up deadline – they receive a credit to their account equal to a free month of hosting.”
“All levels of our support team regularly meet with our engineers and network managers to talk through questions from customers. Our follow-up measures also make us unique – if we feel it’s appropriate, we’ll have a support representative at the management level personally check in with customers for feedback on how their questions were resolved. We also survey all customers who contact us to learn how we can improve our system.”
Q: How can new FatCow customers get off to a successful start?
GE: “We’ve designed our control panel so that it’s easy to use, but we realize that some customers need something extra to really get their sites up and running. That’s why we created our JumpStart service, which gives customers one-on-one time with our best agents to get a feel for the tools and services available.”
“Our QuickStart feature is a free service we offer that instructs customers on adding a domain, the options they have in setting up a mailbox, and introduces them to our website building tools. Customers can also refer to our Knowledgebase, a collection of articles offering technical assistance and helpful background information on products and services, and dozens of multimedia tutorials that provide visual step-by-step instruction. And of course, we are available 24/7 to answer any questions they have.”
Q: How do you ensure your customers receive quality service?
A:” We have a vigorous quality assurance process in place to both maintain our policies and identify how we can improve our training. We conduct separate audits of customer contacts – by phone, email and chat – then compare those audits for an accurate assessment, which ultimately drives our training schedule and new policies. We monitor call wait times, the time it takes to reach first time resolutions and the number of tickets that are escalated to tier-two specialists, which provides us with a broader scope of our support performance.”
“We’ve synthesized the information we obtain from this process on our internal Support Wiki. The wiki provides our agents with a searchable written resource that’s reliable and always up-to-date.”
“Customer surveys also play an important role here, because they give our customers the opportunity to “QA” our support staff right along with us.”
Q: How do you actually use the information from customers to improve your services?
A: “We use the information to improve the overall quality of our customer support. We use customer feedback from surveys and follow-up calls along with internal audits to examine agents’ performance on an individual basis. That’s how we identify strengths and areas that require additional instruction, which are then worked into our training process. Our goal is to provide reliable web hosting, and this process plays a major part in fulfilling that goal.”
